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xenadu

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Everything posted by xenadu

  1. Well I'm not surprised. I would guess this is just the cellular block from the iPhone 5S but with all the amps/filters/etc installed. A solid update. My only beef is the storage... It's about time they bumped it up a level.
  2. I suppose it could support band 41. There's a lot more space and a bigger battery, wouldn't be the first time they supported something in the iPad that they couldn't fit into the phone yet. Right now Sprint is offering 15/month for 2GB, I think the tiny 25MB plan is 5/month. I'm not aware of them having any special add-on plan for phone customers. What I'd like (and I bet many others would) is a 5/month 500MB plan with roll-over up to 10GB. I don't need cellular on my tablet often, but turning it on (or turning on tethering) for just a few hours or days is a pain I can live without. I'm sure that's why ATT is offering their day-pass plans.
  3. First day or two while everything was syncing battery life was bad, but it has settled in now and is as good of better than before.
  4. Unless you print your own MattDollars in your basement, household budgets and government budgets are nothing alike. Another interesting fact: the US Mint strikes new coins every year. They hand them to the Federal Reserve bank, who then credits the US Treasury account with money it creates out of thin air (on a computer). There is no absolute requirement that the government fund deficits with debt, they could just as easily strike coins or give themselves a credit for nothing. If they do that faster than the economy grows or the Fed Reserve Bank doesn't offset it elsewhere it will cause inflation. The only reason the current system uses debt is to make it easier to track what governments spend and how much a currency is worth, it's not an intrinsic property of reality. If the government pays down its total debt over time, that money has to come from somewhere (read: people's pockets), thus decreasing the overall money supply, unless the Federal Reserve takes steps to offset that by creating new money elsewhere. If the money supply doesn't outpace GDP, then fewer and fewer dollars are chasing the same amount of goods and that's called deflation. As long as the governments total debt doesn't grow faster than GDP, it can grow forever with no penalty, subject to interest rates. Current interest rates on US government debt are currently so low that in many treasury auctions people take negative return (they *pay the US Government to hold their money for them*). Any deficit spending on infrastructure or other projects started now would be equivalent to your bank loaning you 200,000 to build a house and only asking you to pay back 190,000 over the life of the loan. We should all be so lucky. You can't make less money after a raise, that's not how income taxes work, though I am shocked at how many people seem to repeat this misconception. The only stuff that works like this are benefit programs for the poor, where one dollar over the cutoff gets you thrown out of the program (Medicaid for example). I have limited my post to verifiable facts, I leave the opinionatin' to others.
  5. Wife's gold model arrived a lot faster than Sprint predicted, about two weeks. Probably because I got her the 64GB model and those are less commonly ordered. I didn't order mine until Saturday/Sunday and it arrived that week, but I'm sure 64GB gray is the least popular.
  6. I got a black 64GB, wife is waiting on a gold 64GB. If you run the numbers, accounting for the different models and launch countries, Apple beat the previous launch by about 30%, not the nearly double the raw numbers might indicate. That's still fantastic performance any company would kill for. The margins on the 5C and 5S are probably similar, if not better on the 5C so from an investor's point of view it is somewhat irrelevant what the mix of models was. Some people even think the 5C has a much better margin leading to similar profit from either model. As a developer, I know 90%+ of all iOS users will be on iOS 7 within a month or two so the mix is irrelevant in that sense too. I predict the mix will heavily favor the 5S for some time as the early adopters want the latest and greatest, but the 5C will probably do blockbuster sales for the holidays. China is interesting, Apple is still selling the iPhone 4 there at a greatly reduced price. I believe the 4S is also cheaper there. Since Apple supports the iPhone with software updates for much longer than any Android phone ever, they can buy a top of the line device and keep it for 3-4 years or more, plus it's a status symbol for some. Apple has never had the majority of the phone market and never will because they will never make a budge phone to go after the low end. BMW has less than 1% of the car market but I don't see anyone predicting their downfall anytime soon. The iPad was an aberration because "everyone" had decided that tablets were a low-volume niche business and that Apple was jus selling a big iPod. I remember journalists being very "meh" about it and competitors being shocked they were selling it for 499.
  7. In the age of carrier complaining about subsidies, it makes no sense to aim for locked-down devices. I think its just Sprint being resistant to change. We shall see if the CSIM comments are true. My 5S should arrive tomorrow; looking forward to it. Sure, I'd love it to support band 41 but that is only one consideration among many. People claiming that is their primary consideration must have some really strange/uncommon uses of their cell phones.
  8. I can vouch for digiblur, give the guy a break. If a larger than 4" screen is a must-have for you, then head on over to the Android section and enjoy yourself. If you want the world's best mobile phone CPU then get the iPhone 5S. There are a ton of other considerations and it all depends on what you like. I hire Apple to make choices for me. I'm busy making money or spending time with my family, customizing my phone's ROM fell off the list a long time ago. But if you love that sort of thing you might make different choices.
  9. I can't seem to find any info about what happens with multi-device plans because so far the unlimited plans are a big price jump if you are on a family plan, unless the 15/line discount applies to all lines even ones not taking an upgraded device immediately.
  10. The release notes say that part of the carrier API has been officially opened up to allow querying cell type, signal strength, etc. I haven't checked to see if it really is there and works yet and sometimes things change before official release, but in theory Sensorly should work on iOS 7. There is also a carrier authentication part but that's only open to official carrier apps right now - it lets you validate the user's carrier account without a login.
  11. Sigh... same old, same old. I'm not going to address this tiring stuff again. Yes, Samsung's entire lineup of 60+ odd models (13 on Sprint in the US alone) sell more units than Apple's lineup of 3 models. Absolutely true and it has been true since Apple released the iPhone (though it wasn't always Samsung selling more units). I want to address something else... the inaccurate reporting that crap journalists love to run with. You may have seen the headlines that Samsung's profit surpassed Apple's this past quarter... except it is entirely untrue and the original sloppy article was pulled, but the original story is still bouncing around. http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-dethroned-apple-in-mobile-profits "Apple is earning greater operating profits than all of Samsung Electronics, despite the fact that Samsung operates across a lot of other businesses. Apple sets aside more for taxes, so its reported net profit is slightly but not significantly lower, at least in the current currency exchange. A Google search for the original, incorrect headline "Samsung Made $1.43 Billion More In Profit Than Apple Last Quarter " returns 6,650 results. Some of those syndicated reports have been corrected, including those by the San Francisco Chronicle and Yahoo Finance. Many other blog entires have not, such as this one byCult of Android. Even the corrected version still mixes up "net profit" for "operational profit," and says that Samsung doesn't report net profit (the company does, as shown above). A report by CNET described Samsung's IM earnings as its "mobile business," obscuring the reality that this group, even its "mobile" subgroup that excludes networking sales, also sells all of Samsung's PCs and tablets. That report noted that IM accounts for about two thirds of Samsung Electronics' revenue, and had declined by 3.5 percent over the previous quarter. That decline occured despite the fact that Samsung had launched its new flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone in April. In contrast, Apple's sales for the quarter represented the third quarter of its iPhone 5 flagship." You can read the rest of the article but I wanted to point out that most "journalists" these days have an agenda and they are looking for anything to report that confirms the existing narrative. Apple doubles this effect because it has always made people lose their minds. The current Apple narrative is that the company is imploding and worth less than Dell, depsite the fact that they just spent the entire market cap of Nokia and Dell to repurchase shares using excess cash. Tech journalists are also desperate to report on something, anything, new regardless of whether it is needed or useful... oh and the obsession about specs like processor speed that can't be directly compared between different SoCs anyway. Short version: don't take the "news" you read too seriously.
  12. You keep older devices around on older OSes. They've improved the simulator a lot though; it now supports installing various older OS releases. If needed, you can buy an old 3GS running iOS 4 for cheap. The reality is 95% of all iOS devices are running iOS 6 so supporting older OSes past that isn't terribly relevant. They also are pretty good about maintaining stable APIs and deprecated stuff is often available for several major releases before it goes away. In practice, I've only ever run into OS version issues one time. If you dont have experience developing for other platforms, let me just say it seems like a miracle.
  13. IIRC, Softbank (Apple's original launch partner in Japan and still their largest customer there) is deploying 2.5 GHz spectrum. Sprint is deploying it here. China Mobile is deploying it. They are using it in Europe (as Band 7 and 41 IIRC) Someone correct me if I am wrong but Band 7/41 are the same, they just differ in FDD vs TDD so the current crop of LTE chipsets should support both no problem. I don't know if you need different filters and whatnot to support them separately, as others have pointed out we aren't yet capable of doing software filtering and amplification*. I think the likelyhood is 50/50 that they will support it in the next iPhone; Apple really wants a deal with China Mobile, Softbank is an excellent partner that they value, and Sprint is the only one keeping unlimited data in the US which depends heavily on that band. Unlimited data makes for a better user experience for Apple's customers. * Obviously the future is SDR (Software Defined Radio). We've gone from a cabinet full of equipment to a single rack to a single PCI card in 10 years, but it is still too hot and power-hungry to work in a mobile phone. I predict the next generation of base station hardware will be software radio driven though. It will let vendors sell a whole new set of equipment upgrades instead of waiting for the replacement to LTE (decades and decades away), then charge carriers for software upgrades which is always an easier way to make money. Not sure when that will happen, but it will happen eventually.
  14. None of those links support the assertion that the iPhone is dying. In fact if you read closer, Samsung and local chinese companies are grabbing marketshare by making non-3G capable phones that are ultra-cheap! Those phones have almost no profit in them. I doubt Apple will ever address that market segment. They may move to a two form-factor setup or release a cheaper iPhone... they certainly moved that direction with the iPod and now iPad. More to the point, the iPhone continues to increase its marketshare as I pointed out in my earlier post (and so does Samsung). You can't just talk about Android anyway. As far as sales go, Samsung *is* the Android market so it would be more appropriate to say that Samsung is leading in marketshare by playing across the ultra-cheap, medium, and high-end categories while Apple takes the majority of global handset profit by focusing only on the high-end. In China, none of them can beat the home-grown 2.5G el-cheap-o specials and they'd be lucky to make $5 per sale if they bothered, so in terms of size China may nominally surpass the US soon but in reality the "addressable" market will remain smaller for some time. Almost every US customer can afford the iPhone 4S or Samsung S3, the same cannot be said of China (or India for that matter). What interests me is how long Google will sit back watching their ad revenue shrink as Samsung takes all the profit Android manages to produce and who will move first... Samsung forking Android to make their own custom OS or Google getting serious with Motorola and undercutting their partners (possibly even making future updates closed-source Motorola-only). Google's recent numbers have got to have the wheels turning in several heads right now. For that matter, how long will LG, HTC, and the other also-rans keep trucking with Android since they can't differentiate from Samsung besides more horrible skins and dialers. To get more on-topic, with half of Verizon activations being iPhones I don't think they will have a problem meeting their purchase commitment. Sprint also seems on-track to meet theirs.
  15. Automatically launching on startup is a jailbreak thing only. If an app is not scheduled for CPU time, it cannot initiate or respond to any network requests and therefore cannot keep the radio alive; however waking up every 15 minutes to chat with a server does wake up the radio. It appears (based on that guy's blog post) that it stays active for 10 seconds sending/receiving who knows what. I was technically incorrect for a few specific situations but my original point still stands... people fuss with the app drawer constantly, wasting a lot of time and accomplishing nothing in most circumstances.
  16. Sure: "Samsung’s Radio City Music Hall launch of its Galaxy S IV smartphone made good headlines, but consumer buying data shows that at the checkout counter, Apple continues to eat Samsung’s lunch. Apple’s “black hole” ecosystem captures subscribers who never leave, while Android smartphones are losing one out of every six customers to other manufacturers. These trends will drive Apple ownership well past Android ownership by 2015 and will reinforce Apple’s dominance in tablets as well." http://www.yankeegroup.com/ResearchDocument.do?id=60321 And asymco's take on the above: http://www.asymco.com/2013/05/05/platform-churn/ US mobile platform share: "The latest comScore US smartphone install base data is in and there are few surprises. iPhone has reached a new record high penetration (39.2%) and user base (54.3 million). Android has reached a new high in user base (72 million) but share at 52% is below the peak reached in November 2012 This pattern of gradual iPhone share gain in the US has been consistent for over two years even while Android has catapulted into an overall lead. The surprising thing is how Android seems to have peaked in share. There are still 95 million non-smartphone users and there seems to be headroom for growth even though the other platforms have been tapped out. But it does not seem that Android phones have any particular advantage over iPhone. My hypothesis remains that as price is taken out as a differentiation, the adoption of iOS is slightly higher than Android." http://www.asymco.com/2013/06/05/measuring-us-mobile-platform-shares-kantar-vs-comscore/ And his response to the dumb meme that everyone already has a smartphone: "says UBS analyst John Hodulik, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal. No they haven’t. According to the latest comScore survey data, 98 million Americans above the age of 13 don’t use a smartphone as their primary phone. That’s 41% of US mobile phone users. What’s more, 2.5 million more people first started using smartphones in the three month period ending May vs. the three month period ending in April." http://www.asymco.com/2013/07/17/everybody-has-got-a-smartphone/ Lots of pretty graphs and whatnot to be found at the links above, but here is just one. Note the box in the upper-right, showing how up until this point iPhone and Android have basically squeezed everyone else out of the market:
  17. Interesting... they are abusing the VoIP rules, intended to only be occasional keep-alives, to get around the restrictions sorta. The app isn't actually running the entire time, it just wakes up for 10 seconds at a time, probably to send/receive a keep-alive ping to the server. Unfortunately across a whole day all that waking up the cellular modem can have a negative effect on battery life. I have no idea why they are waking up every 15 minutes, once an hour should be plenty. Well I learned something new today! I guess if an app has VoIP features and the developers decide to be dicks they can uselessly burn battery life. Of course you'd be rejected from the app store if you claim the VoIP permission in your plist but have no VoIP features
  18. The iPhone has never really competed with Android directly for customers. They both simply consumed the entire feature phone, blackberry, and windows phone market... A process that continues. Android passed the iPhone because almost every new phone at every carrier that wasn't an iPhone was some cheap, low-powered Android clone. There are two markets... The high-end where the Galaxy S4 and iPhone 5 compete. Some smaller percentage of this market cares about CPU performance, customization, or whatever. The majority of the market just walks into the store and takes whatever the carrier hands them, complete with advertisements, pre installed crapware, and shitty skins. For half of these customers the phone might as well be a feature phone because they don't give a crap. Part of the reason Apple insists on these deals is to stop the carriers from steering people away from the iPhone, especially given all the rebates and marketing incentives Samsung passes out... A year ago they were basically paying carriers 100-200 per phone to shill their devices. I won't cry any tears for Verizon if they don't meet the quota due to taking Samsung kickbacks to push people away from iPhones, and that's also the reason Apple won't give them an inch on the contract. A few other tidbits: Half the US doesn't have a smartphone yet. That's a lot of customers. The iPhone activations have been moving the needle... The iPhone isn't half the smartphone install base yet but it continues to creep closer and closer. The iPhone is stickier... More people that switch to an iPhone will continue to upgrade to an iPhone, so net switchers accumulates customers to Apple. There is still a lot of room for growth but at some point in the next three years we will be switching to an entirely upgrade-based market. At that point, if the stickiness holds, the iPhone will begin stealing Android marketshare. Those are a lot of IFs though, no one really knows what will happen between now and then. And to your point, the iPhone isn't dying. It continues to grow marketshare as a percentage and total install base. It continues to be the majority of mobile web traffic, majority of App Store revenue and developer attention, and gobbles up almost 60% of global mobile profits, while only holding 8% marketshare. If that's dying, we should all be so lucky.
  19. I don't know how many other ways I can say this but iOS will *literally* suspend your app, unscheduling it from any CPU usage, when you enter the background unless you are actively playing audio or have requested the 10 minute background task exception. VoIP apps are also suspended, but their network ports are left open. For VoIP, if a call (packet) comes in, the OS will wake the app back up to handle it. For apps with the 10 minute exception, when the time is up the app will be warned to stop *NOW*, then suspended if it behaves or killed if it refuses. Apps like messenger work by push notifications; the app itself is not running, the OS handles receiving and displaying the push notifications. That's why you can't have custom push notification sounds unless they ship in the app bundle - the OS copies the sound (and icon) out of the app bundle to its own cache so it can completely handle the notification without the app's help. Now if the app is the foreground app and the screen locks, it isn't necessarily suspended right away until the device actually goes to sleep. So if you go back to the home screen, Facebook Messenger can run for at most 10 minutes to finish background activity. The OS will then suspend it, period. It will be left in memory as long as nothing else needs the memory so if you re-open it, it can just be resumed. If something needs the memory, it will be dumped and next time starts from scratch. Some of this is changing in iOS 7: + Apps can request to check for and/or download new content in the background. The OS will wait for conditions to be right (strong cell signal, recently connected to WiFi, user woke up phone to do something else, etc) then it will fire off the pending download requests. It keeps track of how often you use apps and allows frequently used ones to make downloads more often, but little-used apps may only get their download requests fired when you plug in to power, once a week, or whatever. The goal being that downloads are batched up and done when network conditions are better (thus better battery life) or when you're burning battery anyway for something else. + If you request it, your app can now be activated by a push notification (for a limited period of time) to handle the notification in the background, that way it can be 100% ready when the user opens the notification or the app later on. I believe you can also kick off a download request (subject to the same rules as above) in response. edit: and guys, let me re-iterate... I am a developer. I am required to know these rules, they affect my applications. I can connect with Instruments and see exactly what processes are running, if they are scheduled or suspended, how much CPU time, RAM, etc they are taking up. I promise you, I am 100% correct and describing how it works not just from the documentation/theory, but from actual observation of a running device under debugging. edit2: I have been educated about the VoIP trick! So what I said may not apply to VoIP-based apps depending on how they are written. Facebook has a horrible track record on iOS, so it doesn't shock me in the least that they are a terrible offender.
  20. Regular AppleCare doesn't cover accidental damage, only AppleCare+.
  21. I thought LTE supported combining such that you could farm it as two 5x5 and devices that supported both could use it as a 10x10, subject to a small decrease in efficiency compared to a true 10x10?
  22. FYI guys, Apple will replace an out-of-warranty or damaged phone, without AppleCare+: iPhone 5 $229 iPhone 4S $199 iPhone 4 $150 That's a massive discount from the nominal retail price of the phone. AppleCare+ gives you $50 replacements as long as you can bring in (most of) the phone. So the short version is don't buy insurance on iPhones and maybe consider AppleCare+ based on what you think your odds are, and always go to the Apple store first. I miss the days of the iPhone 3GS... back then, Apple would replace your first one for free unless it looked like purposeful abuse. My fiance (now wife) dropped hers in the pool and they swapped it for no charge. Frankly, I think Apple should just include the AppleCare+ benefits for all purchasers.
  23. You generally can't downgrade but Apple always makes the final release available to beta devices, though sometimes you have to restore with iTunes if something is completely busted.
  24. Well the majority of shareholders elected the default/cash option so in reality everyone has shares, just less of them. I am curious if it will ping-pong around or stabilize toward Sprint's previous share price. I elected shares but that may end up "costing" be a couple hundred bucks or saved me the trouble of buying shares depending on how the price ends up today. I'm still in it for the long haul so I don't care. Bought mine at 2.70 or so.
  25. Those numbers are just for one quarter; they'd have to be sustained for a year or two to start swinging the overall numbers. Anyway the original article is nonsense but for those of us in the AAPL news game it isn't surprising in the least. Everyone gushes all over themselves to be the first to print some random Apple rumor. The recent spat about "zombie" apps is a good example... Some marketing company claims the majority of apps in the Apple store are "zombies" because they don't appear in the top lists, which Apple only details to the top 400 when the reality is far different. Most of the long tail of apps are regional or niche markets that are extremely valuable to their target audience but will never appear in any top sales or download list. That's the same kind of platform effect that has kept Windows on top of the desktop heap for decades. Did I mention that marketing company wants to sell you services to promote your app? No conflict of interest there! It is almost as amusing as the "people hate the iPhone" story from last week using a survey compiled by no less than one of Samsung's marketing partners! Yet the press runs with the stories because it suits the pre-existing narrative and generates emotional reactions (read: page views). Flash: Microsoft marketing partner says Windows Phone and Slate are the future, iPads now "totally uncool"; news at 11!!!! Can I be a "journalist" now?
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